Joshua Keating is associate editor at Foreign Policy and the editor of the Passport blog. He has worked as a researcher, editorial assistant, and deputy Web editor since joining the FP staff in 2007. In addition to being featured in Foreign Policy, his writing has been published by the Washington Post, Newsweek International, Radio Prague, the Center for Defense Information, and Romania's Adevarul newspaper. He has appeared as a commentator on CNN International, C-Span, ABC News, Al Jazeera, NPR, BBC radio, and others. A native of Brooklyn, New York, he studied comparative politics at Oberlin College.

July 25, 2012 - 5:38 pm

RFE/RL catches a boo-boo on the London Olympics website’s listings for some members of the Russian team:

The entry for judo fighter Arsen Galstyan lists his place and date of birth as "Armenia (RUS)" in 1989, while boxer David Ayrapetyan is listed as having been born in "Baku (RUS)" six years earlier.

Kazakhstan and Tajikistan were Soviet republics back when boxer Sergei Vodopiyanov and wrestler Khasan Baroev were born in the 1980s. But the now independent countries might be surprised to see the birthplaces of these athletes listed as "Kazakhstan Region (RUS)" and "Dushanbe (RUS)."

But perhaps the most contentious entries are for two wrestlers from the Caucasus. Denis Tsargush, the site says, hails from "Gudauta (RUS)" — a city in Abkhazia, the Georgian breakaway republic that Russia and a handful of other nations recognize as independent. And Besik Kudukhov was born in "Yuzhnaya Osetia (RUS)" — that’s Georgia’s other breakaway republic, South Ossetia, that Moscow also recognized as an independent state after a brief war with Georgia in 2008.

It seems like a simple "SOV" designation could solve the problem.

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